He walked the halls of power in $300 suits
Adviser to prime ministers and friend of movers and shakers loved his role as a grandfather
Through decades of influence in the inner sanctum of Liberal politics, Richard O’Hagan worked closely with two prime ministers, befriended an American vicepresident and helped establish the archetype for the modern press secretary.
He also garnered a reputation as a snappy dresser.
In Grits, her 1982 history of the Liberal party, journalist Christina McCall-Newman made note of O’Hagan’s “fondness for handmade shirts and three-hundred-dollar suits.”
Christina Valentine, the youngest of his three children, said her dad’s fashion ensembles were carefully curated, even when he was just moseying around the family cottage.
“My father loved clothes,” she said with a laugh.
“He devoted a lot of time and effort to getting his outfits just right.”
O’Hagan, whose life experiences spanned small-town New Brunswick at the cusp of the Great Depression to the halls of power in the economic and political capitals of his time, went into cardiac arrest at his Toronto home on Sunday and died in the hospital later that day. He was 90. In the days since, the man who friends called “Dick” is being remembered as an affable and sharp-minded media relations professional who played a key role in the coterie of political advisers to Liberal prime ministers Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
In between, he was posted for a decade as minister-counsellor in the Canadian embassy in Washington, D.C., and went on to work for more than 20 years with top executives at the Bank of Montreal.
Tom Axworthy, Trudeau’s principal secretary in the late 1970s and early 1980s, said O’Hagan made a “huge impression” for his quick wit, breadth of knowledge and instinct for communication and working with reporters — and yes, he had an “excellent sartorial sense.”
“He set the gold standard for being a press secretary and media adviser,” Axworthy said.
O’Hagan was born March 23, 1928, in Woodstock, N.B., a small town near the U.S. border that hugs the west bank of the St. John River.
The older of two boys, O’Hagan grew up in the same house where his father, a train conductor, was born.
After graduating from university, he relocated to Ontario in the late 1940s to work as a reporter for the Toronto Telegram.
That’s where he met Wanda, a young woman who had emigrated from Poland with her family during the Second World War, and worked in the newspaper’s publicity department.
They fell in love quickly, Valentine said, and were married within two years.
“He thought my mother was so beautiful,” Valentine said, recalling how he would often proclaim how gorgeous she looked. “We all grew up in a house with parents where you could feel their love.”
By the early 1960s, O’Hagan had left journalism and worked for the MacLaren’s advertising agency.
Conservative John Diefenbaker was prime minister, having relegated the long-governing Liberals to the opposition benches for the first time in a generation.
In Grits, McCall-Newman describes how Liberal operatives Keith Davey and Jim Coutts were pushing the party machine toward reform. They hired MacLaren’s to help with a new publicity and advertising campaign, inspired in part by John F. Kennedy’s winning playbook in the 1960 U.S. election, and O’Hagan was sent to Ottawa to work with the Liberal party.
John English, a former Liberal MP who wrote a biography of Pearson that was published in 1989, said O’Hagan was integral to the modernization of the Liberal machine.
He was also adept at dealing with politicians — particularly when trying to remedy gaffes, such as the speech Pearson gave at Temple University in April 1965 that famously enraged U.S. President Lyndon Johnson for suggesting a pause in the U.S. bombing campaign against North Vietnam.
In 1967, O’Hagan was appointed to a post in the U.S. capital, where he ran the information division in the Canadian embassy for the next 10 years.
He got to know a host of movers and shakers, including a U.S. senator named Walter Mondale, whose kids went to the same school as O’Hagan’s. Mondale went on to become the U.S. vice-president when he was elected on the 1976 Democratic ticket with Jimmy Carter.
“Dad was engaged in his job, but he was (also) engaged with people and ideas and principles,” said O’Hagan’s son, Peter.
After a decade in the U.S., O’Hagan was recalled to Ottawa to assist Trudeau with his media relations.
“O’Hagan was able to manage Trudeau, because Trudeau could go off and get himself into serious trouble,” said Martin Goldfarb, one of the prime minister’s key advisers at the time.
“(O’Hagan) was always in control. He thought very carefully of the implications of every word written or spoken, and I don’t think he ever misspoke.”
With reviews like that, it was probably just a matter of time until he was recruited into the private sector.
In 1979, O’Hagan took a job working directly with Bill Mulholland, the notoriously hard-driving chair of the Bank of Montreal.
O’Hagan stayed with the bank for more than 20 years, advising executives as a consultant even after he retired around 2000.
A creature of routine — regular exercise was a must, as was his daily breakfast of an egg with dry toast and marmalade — O’Hagan was hesitant to slow down his jam-packed working life.
Outside of work, O’Hagan loved to gather with his family at their cottage on Mary Lake in Muskoka. And he relished his role as a grandfather to his six grandkids.
Last Saturday night, Peter and Valentine and two of Valentine’s kids came over for dinner. True to form, O’Hagan looked sharp in a crisp blue shirt.
He enjoyed a meal of braised rib stew and blueberry tarts.
A funeral mass will take place at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, 78 Clifton Rd., today at 11 a.m.
“He set the gold standard for being a press secretary and media adviser.” TOM AXWORTHY KEY AIDE TO PIERRE ELLIOTT TRUDEAU